3 Hard-Earned Skills I Got From Training For My First Marathon
3.) How to overcome the games your mind plays on you
I played a lot of golf in my early twenties.
Tuesday mornings, Friday afternoons, Saturday outings. It didn’t matter.
I’d take my clients out on the course with a few beers loaded in the cooler. “How lucky are we!” We’d always say at some point during the round. “On a golf course, and we call it… work.”
Sounds like the dream job, right?
Well, it’s a big fat lie.
I’d go home feeling like garbage from all the hotdogs and Bud Lights. The hangover would carry over into the next workday.
I was ok with it because, at the time, I thought the key to life was to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
That’s backward.
Growth and development come from purpose, not pleasure. It comes from learning to cope with pain. It comes from taking on challenges and figuring out a way to get things done despite all the internal resistance telling you to stop.
That’s why I placed golf on the back burner for a while and picked up a sport that challenged me physically.
Endurance running.
I’m training for my first marathon this year and learned three skills I wouldn’t have learned elsewhere.
1.) How to increase the perimeter of your willpower
I had the wrong idea about endurance running.
I thought it was all about speed.
I told a veteran runner (and Boston Marathon qualifier) that I planned to move up pace group from 9:00 to 8:30 PPM for my long run days. “Sure you can.” She responded. “But just know you’re defeating the purpose of long-run workouts.”
Huh?
“Distance training isn’t about speed,” she said. “It’s about time on your feet.”
“It’s getting used to burning out your hamstrings. Boredom. Remembering the pain of tearing off a dead toenail the next day.”
Endurance training is rarely about getting done faster. It is about increasing the perimeter of your willpower.
The sports writer Matt Fitzgerald describes it like this:
“Imagine walking on a bed of hot coals. At the other end is a wall. The wall is your absolute limit, you’re quitting point. The thing is, you never actually reach the wall.”
Your goal is to get as close to the wall as possible.
2.) How to accept pain and manage discomfort
My running partner, Jonathan, likes to get acclimated before workouts.
For example, during our commute to training, he will roll up the windows, shut off the AC, and turn off the music. Soon enough, we’re sitting in a car pushing 108 degrees. “We have to get acclimated,” he tells me.
All great runners practice acclimation. Where most people suppress pain and say, “I really hope this doesn’t hurt.” Elite runners will say, “This is going to hurt like a mother f*cker, but I can handle it.”
According to sports psychologists, the more discomfort an athlete accepts, the more pain they can tolerate.
3.) How to overcome the games your mind plays on you
My college golf coach once told me that mental toughness is about being aware of the little tricks your mind plays with you.
One trick is our tendency to fantasize about the outcome whilst forgetting about the task at hand.
Call it daydreaming.
Before I left for Austin, Texas, Jonathan gave me a cool book about sports psychology called How Bad Do You Want It.
The book told a story of a triathlon runner Siri Lindley — a superb endurance athlete who underachieved for most of her career.
Why?
It is written that she struggled with confidence. She carried around pent-up childhood trauma (her parents’ divorce) and raced to show the world that she was good enough.
That’s a lot of pressure to place upon yourself.
Her friend connected her to an insane coach who lived on top of a mountain in Switzerland named Brett Sutton.
This dude was like a combination of Ra’s al Ghul from Batman and Pei Mei from Kill Bill. No joke.
On Lindley’s first day, Sutton ordered her to set up her bike on a turbo trainer and do a 3-hour ride. “I just hiked a mountain to get here. I don’t have any clothes.” she protested.
“That’s Ok,” the coach said. “You can wear what you have on.”
That was her life on that mountain. 4000 meters swims on top of 26-mile runs on top of 100-kilometer bike rides. Every day she did things she didn’t know her body could do.
Here’s the thing about Coach Sutton’s training: It was less about physical exercise and more about building belief.
It casts out the mind games and redirected her energy from dreaming to doing. From dead time to alive time.
Siri went on to be the #1 ranked triathlon athlete in the world and became one of the greatest coaches in the world after she retired.
Everything in life is a fight
The writer Steven Pressfield describes creative endeavors like trying to slay a dragon.
“On the field of the self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.”
The blogger and entrepreneur Tom Kuelger describes writing as a boxing match.
“It’s throwing a punch — in the form of words, articles, and ideas — not knowing if it will resonate with anyone.
It’s getting hit — with rejections, obscurity, burn out, and minimal progress — not knowing if you’ll be able to keep going.”
The same holds for anything big and important you’re trying to accomplish.
Could be training for a marathon. Writing a screenplay. Starting a business. There are always external distractions pushing against your goal, but the greatest challenge is overcoming the self.
You must defeat your own resistance and believe.
“There is an enemy, and that enemy is inside you.” — Steven Pressfield
That’s why I run.
You won’t increase your willpower, find acceptance, or learn about the tricks your mind likes to play on a golf course while shotgunning a beer.
It would be nice if life worked that way, but it doesn’t.
Sorry.
Do hard things.